A Mesmerizing Marathon of Robert Frank’s Movies

“The life of Robert is an immense onion,” the filmmaker Laura Israel told me recently. “I kept finding things out. Most people, you reach a point, you have them. But with him things are always happening. He wants to change it up. He’s a drifter, flows to the next thing. It’s hard to edit that.”

Israel was talking about Robert Frank, the ninety-one-year-old Swiss-born New York photographer best known for the iconic 1958 book “The Americans.” His response to making his masterpiece was to put his Leica in the cupboard, as he once said, and get himself a movie camera. Over the next fifty years, Frank completed thirty films—and, for the last twenty of those years, Israel was alongside him, sorting through the raw footage, making selections with him as his editor. Out in the world, meanwhile, many people had the impression that Frank had disappeared onto some remote cutting-room floor. (“Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank?” was the headline of a 1994 Times profile.) In the hallway at his Bleecker Street home, a dusty tower of film canisters accumulated. Frank’s films have been as little seen as the famously withdrawn photographer himself.

But, largely because of Israel, that is about to change. She spent eight years tracking down and remastering twenty-eight of Frank’s movies for a boxed set that the German publisher Steidl will release in August. An eight-week, twenty-five-film Frank retrospective will begin at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that same month. The Museum of Modern Art recently agreed to preserve all of Frank’s negatives and supporting materials. And, on July 13th, Israel’s documentary “Don’t Blink: Robert Frank” will première with a two-week run at Film Forum. (After one of the screenings, I’ll be talking with Israel at the theatre.) On some of those nights, “Cocksucker Blues,” Frank’s 1972 offstage documentary about the Rolling Stones, will complete a Frank double feature; because of the Stones’ lawyerly misgivings about explicit scenes of sex and drugs, the movie never had a theatrical release.

I have been talking with Frank for five years about how he understands his life and work, so that I can write about him—and yet, when it came to his movies, I was as baffled as the next person. Critics, including Manohla Dargis, of the Times, and younger filmmakers, such as Richard Linklater and Jim Jarmusch, consider Frank the godfather of independent American personal cinema. They revere his contempt for standard approaches, his willingness to try anything, his willingness to fail. But I am a pretty conventional moviegoer. I found his shaggy-dog day-in-the-life film of his Beat-poet friends, “Pull My Daisy,” from 1959, and his long meditation on mental illness, love, family, and conventions of behavior, “Me and My Brother,” from ten years later, beautiful and arresting. But much of the work was mystifying to me. Frank had laid out and sequenced “The Americans” meticulously. Some of the films, by contrast, seem like near-random collages. Was he trying to say something about spontaneity? Was there a method at all?

One day, I confessed my confusion to Frank. He said abruptly that he was displeased with his films: “It was bigger than me. I failed.” Showing his longer films to small audiences got so “boring,” he said, that one day he cut a couple of them up, stitched together sections of one with chunks of another, and then showed an audience what amounted to two fresh movies. By this point, I knew Frank to be notoriously sly and puckish, and ambivalent about everything. I still had the feeling that I was missing something, that he had groped toward a significant vanishing point, and that, in the films, deeper forces were at play than even he was admitting.

A scene from the documentary “Don't Blink: Robert Frank,” by Laura Israel, Frank’s longtime editor.

Photograph by Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Assemblage Films.

There was the fact of an editor, though—and, recently, Israel offered to help me unpeel the films a little. We decided to meet up at the Yale Film Study Center to watch them all—a two-person Robert Frank movie marathon. She wore muted corduroy and canvas clothes and a calm smile beneath an alert frizz of hair. She was just back from Frank’s home town of Zurich, where he had received a medal of honor from the mayor and Israel had shown her documentary. “He said something funny,” she recalled. “ ‘You can go home again, but I’d like to leave now.’ ”

Israel, who is fifty-eight, had spent a year on the film-festival circuit, but she seemed energetic. She shares Frank’s restless desire for adventure, she said. In the nineteen-seventies, she often came into New York from western New Jersey for “an amoeba crawl” of the downtown punk clubs, after which she would bed down on the floor at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. By the time she met Frank, she was in her thirties and working out of an editing studio on Broadway, not far from the Bleecker Street building where Frank and his wife, the artist June Leaf, have lived for decades. Israel collaborated with directors like Gus Van Sant, John Lurie, and Laurie Simmons, and made music videos with Lou Reed, David Byrne, and Keith Richards. She often saw Frank around the neighborhood, and they became friends. When Frank was invited to make a video for the band New Order, he hired her.

Frank had always been averse to publicity. When his fame grew, he fled New York to a battered fisherman’s house overlooking the sea several miles from the village of Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he still retreats as soon as it gets warmish. So Israel was surprised when Frank began encouraging her to make a film about him. Before she began it, he gave her a present—a whistle. He said, “I don’t want to be too responsible for the film, but if you get in trouble use it and let me know and I’ll help you. I trust you.”

At Yale, a cheerful archivist named Brian led us past stacks of Film Quarterly and Cineaste through a screening-room door with a sign on it that read “No Food or Beverages Allowed.” Israel opened a backpack filled with Frank’s films, a laptop, and a big bag of popcorn. There was still that calm about her. It’s the business of film editors to be people who are easy to spend time with while sitting in the dark.

We began with “Pull My Daisy.” Israel said that one of the cast members, Allen Ginsberg, believed that, by making a loosely scripted art film about real people, Frank was after an illusion of truth that would culminate in the higher truth of who they all really were. “Robert just wanted us to be ourselves,” she recalled Ginsberg saying.

The next several films were a blur of European avant-garde pastiche; family memories; eccentric portraits of activists, scientists, a man delivering newspapers. There were cameos from William Burroughs, Robert Downey, Sr., Telly Savalas, and Tom Waits. Watching all of this was like zooming through a very different time. When we got to Frank’s adaptation of an Isaac Babel short story, “The Sin of Jesus,” Israel said, “The sound’s out of sync sometimes. Robert likes things out of sync.” While shooting the documentary at Frank’s place in Mabou, Israel’s director of photography wanted to move items around “because everything was off kilter,” Israel told me. “I said, ‘You don’t art-direct Robert Frank. He is off kilter.’ ”

She’s right. Frank’s films aren’t like anybody else’s. They are jagged and elliptical. They subvert precepts of genre, story, and technique. Within a single movie, there are abrupt shifts from documentary to fiction, from color to black and white. The same frames appear in more than one movie. In “Cocksucker Blues,” Frank toggles between Super 8 and 35-mm. cameras. “Me and My Brother” features Julius Orlovsky, the mentally ill brother of the poet Peter Orlovsky (who was Ginsberg’s lover). Suddenly, an actor, Joseph Chaikin, begins playing Julius. And then the real Julius reappears. Before Frank, it was rare to find people like Julius featured in American movies. “Robert sees himself in these damaged outsiders,” Israel said.

For “Conversations in Vermont,” Frank brought a camera to the experimental school attended by the two children he had with his first wife, the artist Mary Frank. Their daughter, Andrea, would die in an airplane crash, at twenty-one. Pablo, a son, suffered for years with both cancer and schizophrenia before committing suicide, at forty-three. Their parents were both uncompromisingly dedicated to their work. “This is pretty much about a relationship falling apart,” Israel said. She added, “When he says to them, ‘You always wanted normal parents,’ I think to myself, I had normal parents and I wanted this. It’s always the reverse.”

Then she noticed, “I’ve started eating popcorn.” There were kernels in her hand and more at her feet. She looked at the sign on the door. “I take rules very seriously. If they asked Robert not to eat popcorn, he’d throw it on the floor. Robert doesn’t like rules.” I told her I thought Frank liked rules because they gave him something to break. Israel agreed: “When I was just in Switzerland with him, I understood him more. They’re so into rules and it’s so small and clean and orderly and on time.” Just then Brian walked into the screening room. “I see you’ve been inspired by the films,” he said mischievously.

Some of the movies amounted mostly to “time capsules,” as Israel put it. In “About Me: A Musical,” instead of making the film about American music that had been commissioned, Frank made a movie about himself. He plays himself for a while, then an actress wearing only a bedspread “becomes” Frank. It all seemed pretty haphazard, even to Israel, who said, “The film’s part black and white, part color because Robert got some free color film.”

At my suggestion, we waited to watch “Cocksucker Blues” until we were really enervated. I’d seen it several times before, and admired it more each time for how unsparingly it portrays travelling musicians hemmed in by fame and compensating with disinhibition. Life on the road in 1972 for Frank with the Stones meant an orgy in an airplane cabin, George Wallace on TV, hotel-room doldrums and concomitant spikes of heroin, card games and putting on makeup—and only occasionally making some music. It was bleak and thrilling and depressing. “Robert said the Stones worked very hard, and if they messed up they were cruel with each other. He said it was like being on a spaceship: ‘Where the hell are we?’__ and ‘The show must go on.’ ”

We still had almost twenty films to go. “Robert was attracted to risky people who walked the edge of the road,” Israel said after we watched “One Hour,” in which Peter Orlovsky loses his car keys and maybe his mind. “I used to do that—when I was younger, I did a lot of stuff. But I also went to school, worked hard. I thought I’d be stuck forever in Jersey, so I waitressed at the local diner and did drugs. I didn’t know there was anything else. Then I began listening to WFMU free-form radio, and it told me there was another world. I heard Patti Smith, Queen when they were nobody, the Ramones when there were two people in the audience, the New York Dolls with Andy Warhol at the next table, went to see them at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, and then the edge felt more normal. That’s why I have such a reaction to ‘Cocksucker Blues.’ I lost a lot of friends to drugs. It disturbs me to see it.”

Before we knew it, we’d been at it for two days, and the Film Study Center was closing for the week. We went outside, crossed the street, sat on the courthouse steps, and, with Israel’s laptop on her knees, watched a music video that Frank had made in his basement studio for Patti Smith’s song “Summer Cannibals.” As Smith chanted “Eat, Eat, Eat,” Israel conceded, “It’s not a real music video. More understated. The record company shelved it.”

We decided to meet up a few days later in New York, at Frank’s house, to watch the four remaining films. Frank and June Leaf are among the last bohemians left in a neighborhood that was once teeming with artists, writers, and street characters. When we arrived, Leaf and Frank were sitting out on the sidewalk on mismatched folding chairs, taking in the sun. Down the block there was a hipster boxing club, sleek boîtes and boutiques. Frank wore indigo slippers and a stained jacket, but no shirt. Leaf, who is eighty-six, was in high spirits; a solo exhibit of her work was up at the Whitney and another survey was at the Edward Thorp Gallery. She and Frank were about to depart for Mabou until October. People who worked in photography, painting, and film kept walking up to wish them goodbye.

Israel and I went down into Frank’s musty, cluttered basement studio to finish up. It was like walking into one of his films. There were souvenirs and artifacts of his life everywhere: an electric typewriter, a golden papier-mâché swan, a bicycle wheel, two small wooden American flags, the letters of Camus, a pink yard flamingo tacked up near the section of wall where Patti Smith had scrawled the word “EAT” in yellow paint; a kitschy wall hanging depicting the Last Supper.

Israel set up her laptop next to a filing cabinet that had a color photograph of the Mabou house taped to its side. Soon, in the film “Flamingo,” Leaf and Frank were at the Mabou house, rebuilding the foundation. Friends were coming by. It was just like out on the sidewalk, until suddenly we were jarred by dead crows placed on fence posts by farmers to scare the other crows away. Israel said the idea had been “to edit it and make it seem effortless, unedited, a home movie.”

After we took in “What I Remember from My Visit with Stieglitz”—a short goof; Frank never actually met the older photographer—Frank walked into the studio and sat down to watch with us. He was just in time for one of Israel’s favorites, “True Story.” The film is a medley of images from Frank’s past. In the film, Frank says, “I’m at the beginning of something, something new. It’s late or early.” A crazed man on a Bowery sidewalk rails against “artifice.” Along Bleecker Street, hulks of abandoned cars are cleared away. When an older man’s face appeared, Frank exclaimed, “Louis Faurer! My best friend and a very good photographer.” In the film, Faurer, who photographed eccentrics around Times Square, said of his and Frank’s New York, “We thought the sadness of it made us laugh.”

Outside we could hear the boxers pummelling their heavy bag. “It’s kind of funny the pieces we put together,” Frank said to Israel. “I made ‘Flamingo’ because I had a little flamingo, so I thought I better satisfy him. The flamingo in the bottle. He just showed up here. Yup.” He smiled at us. “You had a lot of them to watch. I kept working.” We didn’t say anything. Moments passed. Finally, he said, “The films started and then they disappeared and all went their separate ways. Each is their own short moment. I forget about them. They were so much time in the moment. But it’s the past and you can’t go back. Have to go forward. Deadly to go back.”

Sitting there, I realized that the experience had mesmerized me. I felt I’d just watched a single ongoing film that was unlike any other film I knew. The accumulated effect of so many films made without much money or help or any compromises by Frank was very moving. Frank, a man immersed in the images of his own surroundings, had composed something uncanny and profound about his emotional life and times. He really wasn’t interested in stories. As with “The Americans,” he was out to convey complexities of human feeling and sensation, but in an increasingly intimate milieu. He had left Switzerland; he had lost his children; he had known many great artists, and many troubled men and women, and lived frequently among outsiders; and he seemed to have spent fifty years looking through a viewfinder, attempting to understand his own ever-shifting attitude toward loss.

“I always tell people about our first day,” Israel said to Frank, recalling their culling process. “You were in my studio, we made selects, and then once we watched I said, ‘You want to go back?’ You said, ‘No! It’s fate. Never go back. First thought, best thought.’ I thought, ‘My kind of director.’ ”